GMD/CEO, ARCO Plc, Engineer Alfred Okoigun recently presented awards to deserving winners in science, technology, and mathematics: (STEM) at the last Nigerian Diaspora National Merit Awards ceremony. This event presented an opportunity to recall ARCO’s decades of campaign to elevate science and technology, which came to a peak as the Nigerian Excellence in Science and Technology (NEST) awards of the early 2000s. NDUKA NWOSU, who has over the years, followed ARCO Plc’s campaign for excellence through its corporate social responsibility networks reports.

At the recently concluded Nigerian Diaspora National Merit Award celebration, oil and gas giant, ARCO Plc, once more demonstrated its commitment to the promotion of science, technology, and mathematics In the country.

In the words of Engineer Alfred Okoigun, GMD/CEO of ARCO Plc, ARCO, which was founded 45 years ago, had as part of its vision, “to build a company that builds people.”

That explains the context behind ARCO’s sponsorship of the event in recognition of outstanding performance by Nigerians abroad in the three basic pillars of modern development and discovery, which are Science, Technology and Mathematics (STEM). In the actualisation of this vision, ARCO Plc had, in the recent past, created a number of special purpose vehicles (SPVs) to get to the desired destination.

One such vehicle was for the sponsorship of students or candidates who have shown a proven record of excellence in their chosen subjects. Even professionals who had distinguished themselves on the job got the ARCO scholarship locally and overseas, as well as those seeking industrial training in different institutions of the world.

NiDCOM chairman and event organiser, Hon Abike Dabiri-Erewa, told the audience she was once a Harvard Leadership course scholar as a young reporter, a dream that ARCO helped to actualise. Voke Ogueh, a US presidential prize winner whose works in mathematics as a teacher, are well known, and some students in the country’s institutions of learning were mentioned as award winners. ARCO Plc’s goal was always to promote competition and excellence and, in the process, produce the best of nation builders in the future Nigerian nation.

For those who saw Okoigun in his early days of pioneering work as a nation builder, he pursued with zeal this vision of sponsorship and awards with a messianic sense of urgency, which made a writer call him the Nigerian Alfred Noble and another Mo Ibrahim of Africa.

Earlier, Okoigun, through ARCO Plc, had launched a very bold platform for promoting excellence in science and technology, known as the Nigerian Excellence in Science and Technology Awards (NEST). In his words, “NEST is a commitment to Nigeria, and our own contribution to the growth of the rapid and vibrant sector of science and technology. NEST is a permanent endowment for excellence in the recognition of outstanding Nigerian scientists who have distinguished themselves in one field of accomplishment or the other.”

The NEST Committee was made up of distinguished Nigerians headed by former Director General of the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA), Engineer Vincent Maduka. According to NEST, “a potential recipient must have impacted positively on society through his or her knowledge, innovation and discovery. His contribution must come through an institution, professional body, government, or a private agency. He is expected to have broken known international records, thus adding a new dimension to an existing one.”

Eleven candidates were shortlisted for the awards categorised as Platinum, Gold, and Silver. Among the awardees was US based computer whizz kid Phillip Emeagwali, whose inability to be present disqualified him. Emeagwali’s pioneering work in massive parallel computing, produced the world’s fastest computational speed in 1989. He also distinguished himself in the solution of complex problems using a network of thousands of computers, an imitation or replication of the interconnectedness of neurons in the human brain. There was Prof. Barth Nnaji, former Minister of Science and Technology in 1993 and Minister of Power under President Goodluck Jonathan. Nnaji, who is the founder of the Geometric Power Plant Limited and the National Science Foundation Center for e-Designs and the Realisation of Mechanical Products and Systems, was shortlisted for developing the Modeller System (MS) in use in the aviation industry for designing aircraft surface and computer chassis. His works in robotics also stand him out.

Both Nnaji and Emeagwali qualified for the gold award alongside Henrietta Ukwu, whose works in HIV/AIDS stood her out. Ukwu gained global recognition at a time when the HIV/AIDS pandemic was ravaging the world. She was applauded for her discovery of the drug Crixivan, which reduces the viral loads of AIDS patients to undetectable levels while significantly slowing full-blown AIDS and subsequent death. Dr. Oviemo Ovadge was also shortlisted for the gold category.

Dr. Ovadge’s invention, Eatset, is a life-saving machine for blood transfusion in-situ with no risk of infection. This is the essential Alfred Noble with what looks or indeed what is Nigeria’s own Nobel Award in Science and Technology or an addition to The (Mo) Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership.

The award had nothing to do with the name of the founder, such as the Alfred Okoigun Prize in Science and Technology or the Alfred Award. As always and with humility, he tries to avoid a self-serving objective in all that he does especially in nation building, not even ARCO took credit for this innovative leap into the future, although it would have been normal if all of these expectations had happened.

In a way, the whole idea of scholarships and sponsorships was a replication of a template that brought ARCO Plc into existence. As a student of the prestigious Government College Ughelli, the government of the day through its representatives in the oil industry, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), had sold the idea of training a special breed of graduates to drive the various technical units of the oil sector.

The Petroleum Training Institute-PTI Warri, was positioned to train the potential candidates, and Okoigun was a beneficiary among the 10 candidates chosen as pioneer students from GCU. Shortly after graduation, the national oil giant absorbed them into its technical team, from where Okoigun got a one-year scholarship for additional studies in Italy. Okoigun, who had met the national oil giant Nuovo Pignone, launched ARCO Petrochemical Engineering Company Limited and formed a partnership with the then Italian oil giant. Since then and beyond, ARCO has been a key player in the global and national oil and gas business.

Apart from hosting awards and sponsorships, ARCO has been actively involved in key international seminars and conferences that helped to redefine the current state of gas as a prime export earner. In 1981, just one year after the formation of ARCO, Okoigun sponsored an international gas re-injection conference in Warri. The communique was forwarded to the government of President Shehu Shagari on the way forward for the oil and gas industry.

Another gas re-injection seminar was sponsored by ARCO Plc in 1988, chaired by renowned economist, Dr. Pius Okigbo. The deliberations of that seminar were forwarded as a follow up to the international oil and gas seminar communique of 1981. Less than one year later, the Babangida administration on May 17, 1989, established the Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas Limited through the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) with a 49 percent stake. It was a joint venture partnership with Shell Petroleum having a 25.6 per cent stake, Total Energies (15 per cent), and Eni (10.6 per cent). Dr Okigbo, succeeded Gamaliel Onosode, another mentor of Okoigun and an elder old boy and Worldwide President of GCU Old Boys Association, who was earlier appointed pioneer chairman of the Presidential Committee on the establishment of the NLNG.

Okoigun, no doubt, has traversed the oil and gas sector with ARCO Plc properly positioned as a key player. In June 2022, the Federal University of Petroleum Resources Effurun, awarded Okoigun, an honorary doctorate degree, for his immense contributions to the elevation of values in the Nigerian oil sector, for his philanthropy, and provision of scholarships to engineering students.

Okoigun, a fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Engineers (NSE), who always leads ARCO Plc to Aso Rock with some of his international partners, is yet to do so with the President Bola Tinubu Administration.

As a key actor in corporate Nigeria, Okoigun and ARCO Plc have had their pies in various sectors of industry. It led the establishment of a botched $2 billion Warri based industrial complex Kinvig designed for the manufacture of equipment for the oil and gas sector. ARCO Plc also had a botched partnership with General Electric and the establishment of a Delta State industrial and business district with the state government under Governor Emmanuel Uduaghan. Okoigun had had substantial investments in banking and finance, publishing, and real estate. He has also extended his social corporate responsibility package to sports development with special interests in football and table tennis. The focus was always to position the recipients in the big clubs of Europe.

Beyond national honours which he will not lobby for to be recognised, Okoigun remains a man of destiny, who believes without equivocation in the Nigerian project, which he works tirelessly to actualise through his personal enterprise.